Exit Stage Never
by TechnicolorNina
Summary: For RENTChallenge on LJ. Mark has troubles. So does Roger. There has to be a way out. Mark/Roger friendship, preslash if you squint at it.


**Title**: Exit Stage Never  
**Author**: Nina/**TechnicolorNina**  
**Fandom**: RENT  
**Pairing/Characters**: Mark and Roger. Could be read as Mark/Roger if you have a couple of beers, turn your head sideways, and squint.  
**Word Count**: 12 973  
**Story Rating**: **R/M** for **language** and **sexual references**  
**Story Summary**: Mark knows what he wants.  
**Disclaimer**: Anything you recognise? Totally not mine.  
**Spoilers**: For the end of the series.  
**Warnings**: Nobody's answered me yet. Does naked!Yuugi take a warning?  
**Notes**: None.  
**Feedback**: Yes please.  
**Special Thanks/Dedications**: I'm sure there were some, once, but I have no access to the original anymore.

* * *

The door opened.

Roger didn't turn his head.

Mark grew first concerned and then outright panicked as Roger sat there in the window seat, notebook in his lap, pen on the notebook, their mostly-empty bottle of Jack Daniels beside him, hand curled neatly on top of all, looking out the window and showing absolutely no sign at all that Mark had come home - he checked his watch - four hours early.

"Roger."

No answer.

"Roger . . . I got fired today."

He had, in fact, quit - again - because he might be poor but he still had dignity, and there were some kinds of shit he just wasn't willing to eat. Becoming Alexi Darling's gigolo - or close enough to it to make the term applicable - was one of them. If it had been any other woman - or even a man - he probably would have been somewhat flattered, but Alexi Darling . . . he didn't even want to think about it. He'd tried imagining her in bed for all of about five seconds before he started to feel like his eyeballs were going to fry right out of his head.

Still no response.

"Roger, earth to Roger, come in Roger, Houston, we have a very big fucking problem here, Roger!"

Nothing.

Mark's control finally broke.

He more or less sprinted across the loft, sure he was going to find Roger with his throat cut or something.

Instead, he discovered a syringe and a bottle of pills in the hand closest to the window.

Fear was replaced with fury. After everything he'd gone through, everything _they_ had gone through . . . all it took was Mimi's death and Roger went straight back.

"The fucker sold me baking soda."

Mark jerked back and nearly tumbled onto his ass. "What?"

Roger sighed. He looked beaten. "It wouldn't cook. It was baking soda."

"Good, damn it! Roger, what in the blue _fuck_ got into you?"

Roger shrugged. A sort of self-depreciating grin spread across his face. "Well . . . smack didn't."

"So you got pills?" Mark reached for the bottle. Roger pulled it away.

"Mark . . . I can't do this anymore."

Mark blinked. "Do what?"

Roger waved his hand aimlessly. "Any of this. The tests . . . April . . . Angel . . . Mimi . . ."

Mark felt his anger return in force. "So jump off the Statue of fucking Liberty into a moving tourist bus, why don't you?"

The hopeless, sardonic grin returned to Roger's face. "I'm afraid of heights."

"Fucker."

Roger turned the bottle end over end in his hands, and Mark was finally able to see what it was. Valium. A full bottle of it, in fact. Probably about a thousand milligrams worth or so, he guessed.

A thousand milligrams.

A _thousand _milligrams.

A thousand _milligrams._

Not grains. _Milligrams._

Mark remembered a book he'd read a couple of years ago, when it first came out in paperback. The main character had very nearly been forced to commit suicide by swallowing something like a hundred and eighty milligrams of Valium with a bottle of beer. Mark was pretty sure the guy had died anyway, if he remembered correctly, but he'd forced himself to vomit up most of the Valium first because there was something else he had to do before he died.

A thousand fucking milligrams.

And about a tenth of a bottle of whiskey.

Mark resisted the urge to slap the bottle out of Roger's hands.

"So now what?"

Roger turned to look at him listlessly again.

"What do you mean?"

"Do I have to check you in for suicide watch?"

Roger shook his head.

"Then _what_?"

" . . . "

Mark did his best to keep from leaning forward and shaking Roger until his teeth fell right out of his head.

" . . . I chickened out."

Mark blinked. "Why?"

"If I was going out . . . I didn't want to go out alone."

"So you just waited for me to come back so I could watch. How sweet of you."

"I'm not doing it."

"I take it you decided the devil you know is the better one."

Roger looked shamefaced, yet defiant. "I'm not a coward."

"I never said you were."

"No, Mark, you didn't. But you sit there looking so smug, when you don't even know - "

It was the first time Mark had ever hit someone because he was angry, and his aim was somewhat too low. Had he gone higher, he probably would have broken something vital in Roger's face - a cheekbone, maybe his nose. Instead, he got the edge of Roger's jaw - enough to bruise, but not enough to break - and then they were on the floor, Roger pinned down and stunned absolutely beyond belief, Mark holding down his hands and screaming.

"You think I don't know? I lost April too, Roger! And Angel! And Mimi! You tell me I hide in my work while you run away! At least I _stayed_, Roger! At least I _tried_!"

There were tears on his face now. He pulled back, drew away, shut down. Roger could almost see it happening as a physical act. Mark stood up.

"Forget it."

He turned, headed for his room.

Roger had had a stressful day himself, and it was probably that fact that made him shout at Mark's retreating back.

"You don't know because you don't know what you _want_, Mark!"

Mark wheeled. His face was still wet in two narrow tracks, but his eyes blazed.

"You'd laugh at me if I told you what I want, Roger."

His door slammed.

After several minutes, Roger heard the loud clicking-clacking-grinding noise that was Mark's pretty much antique typewriter.

He listened to it for close to two minutes before he couldn't take it anymore.

Mark jumped when, right in the middle of a paragraph - writing had always been a side hobby of his, after screenplays, that was - a shadow fell over the typewriter.

"So what is it you want?"

Click, clack, grind, return, new line.

"I told you. You'd laugh at me."

Roger sat down on Mark's frameless mattress.

"No I won't."

Mark ignored him.

They sat that way for a good ten minutes, Mark going through two sheets of paper with fever speed.

Roger yanked the third out of the typewriter.

The A and S hammers jammed.

"Fuck! Roger, what was that for?"

"Tell me what you want."

Mark sighed, set aside the board on which his typewriter sat. He stood up, walked aimlessly around the room for some length of time, and finally looked back at Roger.

"I want to not be alone anymore."

Roger blinked.

"I want somebody to look at my work and tell me it's not shit. I want to live in a place where there's heat and decent furniture and electricity without feeling like I'm selling out. I want to go to bed at night and not wonder what exactly I accomplished, other than getting another day older and colder and closer to dead. I want you and Collins to be healthy. I want him to not have to whore himself out as a tutor when he hates it, and I want you to be able to play again instead of being afraid that you lost all the music you ever had. I want to sit down with a good book and not feel like I'm wasting time when I need to be making money for food and heat."

Mark took a breath at last.

"I want to live alive instead of existing, Roger. That's all."

And he turned, and walked out of the room.

Roger's gaze fell on the typewriter. The A and S hammers glared up at him, still caught together in a hated lovers' embrace.

* * *

"Mark."

Mark didn't look up from his position in the window seat. He was turning Roger's Valium bottle end over end in his hands.

"Mark, I think I figured out your problem."

Mark looked up, but not as though he were actually interested. Someone was talking to him, and politeness dictated that he look up. That was what his face said.

Roger held out a small sheaf of paper, about twenty pages' worth that had been stuffed under the typewriter as Mark worked, a page or two at a time.

"What happens next?"

Mark's forehead creased.

"What?"

Roger shook the papers. "What happens next? After Andy leaves, _what happens_?"

Mark leaned back, took off his glasses, pressed his fingers against his eyes. "After he leaves . . . he meets the man with the gun."

"And then?"

Mark pulled his hands away. "Why do you care, Roger?"

Roger crouched down by the window seat. "Because I'm interested."

"_Why_?"

Roger hesistated. "Because . . . because this is about as far from shit as you can get, Mark. Seriously. Where did you come _up_ with this?"

Mark stared blankly through him, rendered blind with his glasses in his lap instead of on his face.

"I made it up."

"Fuck movies. You need to become a novelist, Mark."

Mark laughed derisively. "I'm sure."

Roger touched his hand, trying to bring Mark back into focus with his mind, if not his eyes.

"Mark . . . I mean that. Seriously, this is heavy." He tried to grin. "And just think . . . after you sell the first six million copies, you can make the film."

Mark stared blankly out the window again.

"And share it with who?"

Roger resisted the impulse to correct Mark's bad grammar. Instead he shrugged.

"Plenty of people. Me, if I'm still around, I guess."

Mark finally put his glasses back on as he turned his head.

"You're serious."

Roger nodded. Mark raised a sardonic eyebrow.

"How long do you think it would take before Maureen showed up on our doorstep crying about how leaving me was such a mistake?"

"Fuck Maureen."

"I already did," Mark replied lazily. "For all her experience, she's really not as great as she'd like everybody to believe."

The moment that followed was one Roger would remember for the rest of his life: sitting by Mark's feet, turning his head up in disbelief, seeing the mischievous sparkle in Mark's eyes for the first time in - weeks? Months? - and then they both collapsed, laughing.

At last they sobered. Roger left his head where it had fallen - against Mark's knee.

Mark reached down absently and played with Roger's hair.

And then he said something that made Roger very, very glad he'd decided not to down that bottle of Valium earlier that day, if only because it was said in a tone that Roger hadn't heard from Mark in at least two years, and he was very, very glad to hear it.

"You know . . . it's worth a shot."


End file.
